Standing on the front porch of Tom McCall's childhood home in Central Oregon, it's easy to understand how the great man developed his love of the land and his commitment to preserve it.

The craggy cliff line of the Rimrock, a basalt rock formation that runs for miles, rises 200 feet above the ranch that Hal and Dorothy McCall settled in 1911. To the west, on a clear day at least, the Cascades loom. A short hike from the front door, the Crooked River meanders through the alfalfa where a young McCall and his four siblings played.

For $5.5 million, all this can be yours. Though McCall, who would have turned 100 this week, viewed this sort of untouched Oregon vista as a treasure beyond mere price.

The farm has been on the market since 2009, and the current owners have dropped the price by $1.5 million. They know it will take a special buyer with a distinct vision for the land.

Nothing brands the ranch as a landmark. There's no historical marker, no signs of its significance inside, beyond a copy of "Ranch Under the Rimrock" strategically positioned on a table in the front hallway. Yet its existence -- and even, ironically, the difficulty its occupants are having cashing out -- stands as a monument to Oregon's grandest modern governor and his movement to make his state a place that does things differently, one that is "demure and lovely," that "ought to play a little hard to get."

Westernwold to Salem

If Dorothy Lawson McCall had gotten her way, her children wouldn't have grown up as Oregonians.

She was a Massachusetts girl, raised on her copper baron father's Cape Cod estate, "Dreamwold," which boasted 1,000 acres and its own fire department, train station, bank and racetrack.

She didn't see the point in leaving, but her husband, Henry "Hal" McCall, wanted to make a fortune of his own and was fascinated by the West. He carried his new bride across the country in 1909 to work in a Portland bank. When the wet air proved bad for his health, his father-in-law fronted the money to buy 640 acres in the drier air of Central Oregon. Hal and Dorothy dubbed his new ranch, "Westernwold."

For the first eight years of his life, before his father insisted Dorothy McCall stop heading east every time she got pregnant, Tom McCall split his time between Dreamwold and Westernwold. In Massachusetts, dozens of servants saw to his every need. In Oregon he rode bareback through the sagebrush to a one-room schoolhouse.

Once he had a choice in the matter, McCall rarely ever left. He graduated from the University of Oregon, dabbled in newspaper work and, with his rangy good looks and resonant, patrician voice, became a successful TV journalist and commentator.

Voters elected McCall, a Republican, governor in 1966. The man and the moment were well matched. The environmental movement was new and Oregon, slower to suburbanize than other states, learned from others' mistakes.

McCall wasn't the only person pushing for smart growth. But he had a unique ability to build coalitions and sell voters on programs that put the long-term health of Oregon's landscape over the short-term financial gains of unfettered development.

"He was a pragmatist who could talk about values," said Jason Miner, executive director of 1000 Friends of Oregon, the nonprofit founded with McCall's help to fight for responsible land use.

In 1967, after a Cannon Beach motel owner fenced in a portion of the beach, McCall helped push through legislation declaring everything from the water to 16 vertical feet above the low tide mark as public land. Two years later, he used his political heft to ensure passage of Senate Bill 10, which required all cities and counties in Oregon to come up with comprehensive plans. And two years after that, he backed creation of the nation's first "bottle bill," requiring soda cans and beer bottles to be returnable.

But his most lasting triumph came 40 years ago this May, with the passage of Senate Bill 100.

Playing the bad cop

In the early 1970s, demographers predicted that Oregon, then home to just 2 million people, would add 1 million more by 2000. McCall didn't necessarily want them. "Come visit us again and again," he said. "But for heaven's sake, don't come here to live." -- and he certainly didn't want them going places like Westernwold.

The result was Senate Bill 100, which created a statewide land-use regulatory system aimed at preserving farm and forestland.

Cities and counties remained responsible for planning. But their maps would have to meet state goals that embraced a philosophy of smart, geographically contained growth.

Property owners received a new degree of certainty; you might not like how your land is zoned, but at least you know what to expect, not over the next year but over the next few decades.

"McCall had this theory of how intergovernmental relations go, this theory that you need a good cop and a bad cop, that somebody has to play the part of parent," said Sy Adler, a Portland State University planning and urban studies professor. "Local governments need to be able to say, 'Well, we don't want to say no to ol' Tom, but those people in Salem are making us.'"

Plenty of other people deserve credit for the legislation's long-range impact. McCall provided the political heft and emotional underpinning, with his call to stop "sagebrush subdivisions, coastal condomania and the ravenous rampages of suburbia."

Oregon has suburbia today, but not the octopus of unregulated growth, the cookie-cutter subdivisions and cheaply built strip malls, seen in such abundance elsewhere. Senate Bill 100 is such a part of the state's culture that it's easy to forget how much work went into turning the original legislation into lasting change, or that the version lawmakers approved wasn't as sweeping – think regional planning and even more state oversight of certain special spots – as what McCall initially sought.

Still, McCall fought to preserve the system he helped create right up until his death from cancer in 1983. He recognized it as his crowning achievement.

Oregon voters refused to ditch the system entirely four times. Today, the assaults are more roundabout.

For example: Last year, Gov. John Kitzhaber signed executive order 12-07, allowing three Southern Oregon counties, Jackson, Josephine and Douglas, to craft their own definition for "farm" and "forest" land.

In the order, Kitzhaber noted that it is just a pilot program aimed at helping a struggling region in a down economy. Oregonians in Action, a nonprofit that works to reduce government property regulation, lauded the change as "a monumental order in Oregon land-use planning history."

Fans of Senate Bill 100 worry about the precedent.

"This is the 'death by 1,000 cuts,' approach," said Ed Sullivan, a Portland land-use lawyer who served as general counsel to Gov. Bob Straub, McCall's successor. You can't throw open the front door all the way, so you open the window just a crack." Seeking the right buyer

The McCall family sold Westernwold in 1983.

They'd been renting out the property for at least a decade, and the house was in disrepair. The new owners fixed cracks in the foundation and renovated the kitchen.

Maynard Alves and his wife, Jackie, bought the 560-acre farm in the mid-1990s to go along with another 22,000 acres of ranchland they own in Eastern Oregon.

They tend cows and quarter horses on the property and built a vast equine facility -- including an indoor arena the size of a polo field -- behind the house. Alves converted a screened-in porch into an office and a master-suite nursery into an exercise room.

He also added satellite TV and covered a living-room window with a TV large and prominent enough to make his wife, keeper of the house's history, roll her eyes.

"Men," she said.

Despite the modern additions, the home itself looks much as it did back when McCall resided here. The living room and front foyer boast the same original woodwork and oak floors. A closet door jam on the third floor, now storage but once a playroom, still bears pencil marks McCall and his siblings used to mark their height in 1916.

The views, beautiful and desolate, haven't changed much in a century. This ranch, like the dozens that dot the Lone Pine Valley, is zoned for exclusive farm use, a classification established in the early 1960s but strengthened under McCall and Senate Bill 100. The ranch can be divided just three times, so there's no risk of this becoming a "sagebrush subdivision," despite the proximity to Bend and Prineville.

Which presents a sort of challenge for Alves, a spry 75-year-old still happiest on horseback. He wants to wrap up the complicated details of his estate sooner rather than later. Real-estate agents put the farm on the market four years ago for $7 million. They've had a few nibbles, but three potential deals fell apart.

Realtor Pam Mayo-Phillips, who specializes in matching ranches and ranchers, has plenty of ideas for the property. Add more beds, and this could be a working farm for troubled teenagers. Carve a driveway through the front yard, and it could be a great, green corporate retreat. The basement would, she notes, make a fantastic wine cellar for a rancher who enjoys the finer things at the end of a hectic day with the herd.

Alves and his wife don't seem concerned by how long it's taken to sell.

Him: "We want to see someone who is going to take care of it."

Her: "Someone who appreciates the history."

Him: "They don't have to know the history, though. They don't have to know who Tom McCall was as long as they care about the land."